Have you ever used feature testing for an API? The ability to decide what features will be available based on the environment, user, or specific context is potent.
It allows you to hide features from production users, test features before exposing them publicly, and use the same code in multiple contexts without modifications.
If you’ve never implemented Feature Testing before in Laravel, it can look daunting at first. You can hire a laravel developer to ensure that you get frequent feedback on the products you are working on.
What, Why, and How of Laravel Feature Testing?
Laravel is a PHP web application framework that follows the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern.
When you talk about API testing, you refer to testing the API layer of our application. Laravel has got a library called Dusk for testing REST APIs. This article will help you understand feature testing in Laravel, why it is essential, and how to implement it in your project.
Feature testing is black box testing, where you check whether an application feature works as expected without looking at its internal structure or implementation details. You are just interested in input/output values. In other words, you want to know if your application responds with the correct output when given a specific input value (or set of values).
What does Laravel’s Feature Testing involve?
Feature testing is a way to test whether your code works as expected by mocking and simulating user interaction. It takes advantage of the BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) concepts, where each feature is tested in isolation from other features.
This helps you write more reliable and maintainable code because it can be unit tested and run without requiring access to a database or other services running on another server.
Feature testing involves two main parts:
The first part is creating a test case that checks your application’s functionality. The second part is an assertion that checks whether the feature is working.
Let’s take an example: Let’s say you have an application that displays some text on the screen when a button is clicked. For testing this functionality, you need to write a test case that checks if the text was displayed or not after clicking on the button.
Why is Laravel Feature Testing used?
Many applications have REST APIs that provide data or services to third-party applications. These APIs can often be the most critical part of an application, as they allow other developers to integrate with it.
When developing these APIs, they must continually work as expected and provide the correct data or service. However, this can only be easy if there are few tests.
Laravel Feature Testing allows us to test our REST endpoints quickly, so you know they are working correctly at all times.
The main benefit of feature tests is that they are separate from the code. If a bug is found in one of the tests, you can quickly fix it without worrying about breaking other parts of your application.
This also means they can be run before every commit or pull request is pushed to your repository. This helps catch bugs before they make it into production, which leads to happier users and your angry phone calls.
How Does Laravel’s Feature Testing Operate?
Feature tests use the same syntax as controllers and other classes in Laravel. You have access to all of the same methods and functions as you. By using this syntax, your tests will be straightforward, easy to read and understand what they do without having to dive into the code being tested.
You can use any standard PHP testing framework, such as PHPUnit or PHPSpec, for running feature tests in your application.
The FeatureTest class has two methods: setup() and run(). The setup() method is called before each test, whereas the run() method runs each individual test case. These two methods define what you want to test and how you want to test it.
Create a CRUD business logic and API route
The first thing you need to do is create a business logic that will handle all our requests. The business logic will be responsible for creating models, fetching records, and performing CRUD(Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations. It’s a standard way to model the operations of a database.
Step 1: Create a New Route
Routes are the code that tells your application which page to load when someone visits your website. In Laravel 5, you can use route tests to test whether specific routes will return specific data depending on what is passed in the URL request. You will be using this testing method for our API routes as well.
To start with our new API route, you will need to make sure you have added our route file and added the appropriate code for it.
Step 2: Retrieve data from a database
In this case, you would want to retrieve all the data for a given user. This method accepts a name as its first argument and an array of parameters as its second argument.
The parameters are optional, so if you don’t need any parameters, then you can pass an empty array. You can also pass a single parameter that will make Laravel return all those objects.
Step 3: Modify existing records in a database
To implement CRUD in your API, you must first define the endpoints handling each type of request.
You can start by defining our base routes and controllers. By convention, Laravel uses controller classes whose names begin with an “Api” suffix. This is often used to distinguish between the controller that handles requests for your frontend application vs. the controller that handles requests for your API.
Step 4: Remove records from a database
The code that removes rows from the database is executed in two steps:
First, you call the delete method on each Eloquent model you want to remove. Next, pass the record ID as an argument to this method.
Second, you use the flush method on the database connection to tell Laravel to remove these records from the database.
Implement a feature test in your Laravel application
Implementing feature tests in your application allows you to test your code before you commit it. This helps prevent errors from being introduced into your application when new features are added.
RESTful APIs are the new norm. They are easy to use and implement. One of the primary reasons is that they are easy to implement. Another is that they provide a great way to communicate with other applications, making it easier for developers to create apps.
The Laravel framework offers a variety of tools for building RESTful APIs quickly. It also has an extensive collection of artisan commands that help you quickly test your application’s functionality.
Conclusion
When testing your server-side code in Laravel, you should consider implementing feature testing whether you are writing a service layer or an API. Test the functionality of your application by stubbing routes, controllers, and models while in development instead of relying on the testing framework Ember’s acceptance test harness provides. This is more crucial with a complex server-side microservice architecture where multiple services must be tested and deployed.
